IF I HAD A HAMMER:
Carpenters, Students, and the Path to Transforming the Building Trades

Michael Pesa
Dec. 18, 2003
Internship Paper II

“I pledge myself to be obedient to authority…And I further affirm and declare that I am not now affiliated with, and never will join or give aid, comfort, or support to any Revolutionary Organization, or to any organization that tries to disrupt or cause dissension in any Local Union, District Council, State or Provincial Council or International Body of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America.”

So reads an excerpt from the pledge that everyone must sign to become a member of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America (UBC). (Lens p. iii) The Carpenters—indeed the building trades in general—have rarely welcomed radicals or dissidents of any stripe—even if they are rank and file workers. Historically, student activists have been even less welcome. When people think of the relationship between student activists and construction workers, often the first image that comes to mind is the infamous “hardhat rampage” of 1970 when a mob of angry workers in hardhats beat up a group of anti-war protesters. (Murolo et al. p. 272) Although historians now know that the incident was orchestrated by operatives working for Richard Nixon, it nonetheless reflected a deep-felt cultural disconnect and a sense of mutual hostility that existed between students and blue-color workers. Relations between students and unions have evolved significantly since the ‘60s, and many unions now embrace student activists with open arms. The building trades, however, have by and large remained wary of students, progressive issues, and anything smacking of “movement unionism”. The building trades are among the most conservative, exclusive, and self-isolating unions in existence today.

Yet changes—however small—seem to be in the wind. The Carpenters and the Laborers (LIUNA)[1] are making alliances with more “progressive”, student-friendly, industrial unions like the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the Hotel and Restaurant Employees (HERE), and UNITE (the alliance has been dubbed the “New Unity Partnership”), and are beginning to hire students and recent graduates as staffers and interns for the first time in many years. Student activists, dissident union members, and other labor radicals, cannot afford to miss this opportunity to make a responsible move to help transform the Carpenters and other construction unions in a way that reflects the interests of the members but that also benefits all workers and society at large in a fundamental way. They have given us an inch. Now is the time to take a mile, or risk being shut out of this very important sector of the labor movement forever. In order to do this, however, we need to understand the present state of the building trades and take a look at the reasons for this status quo. This requires a critical appraisal of some of the aspects of these unions that progressives and radicals would like to change. What follows is a critical analysis of some UBC characteristics.

The Carpenters in general are socially conservative or moderate. Many carpenters are deeply religious (largely Catholic, at least in New York City) and belong to traditional families with conservative values, especially in regard to gender and sexuality. Women have historically been excluded from the building trades, institutionally and often very personally. That is beginning to change now, but the process is slow and painful. Women still make up such a small percentage of the workplace in the construction industry, and an even smaller percentage of the leadership, that most members and staffers tend to forget they even exist during casual conversation about the industry, constantly referring to “the men” with such emphasis that it is clearly more than just universalizing the male pronoun. According to labor historian Prof. Priscilla Murolo (in-class discussion) there is also a great deal of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Studies have shown that a high percentage of female construction workers are lesbians, and they have been the subjects of much ridicule and stereotyping. Of course many men assume that ALL women construction workers are lesbians (after all, it’s a man’s job and lesbians are really just women who want to be men, right?), so really all women are discriminated against on the basis of their perceived sexual orientation. Paradoxically, many construction workers swear that every man in the building trades is heterosexual. I wonder if they’re counting the hardhat guy from the Village People.

In order to change this situation, women in the UBC have established a Women’s Committee. The Women’s Committee devotes much of their energy to planning social events for the union (coming dangerously close to replicating the patriarchal definition of “women’s work”), but they also act as a support group for female carpenters and profess as their mission “to create a network of active sisters and to provide avenues for women: to address issues, promote strength, unity, and retention in order to increase and diversify the number of our female workforce in the NYCDCC-UBC. Our aim is to become involved in activities and leadership within our union, thereby making the union a stronger labor organization for all its members”. (Carpenter p. 30) These are goals that could radically transform the trade if carried to their fruition. UBC members also tend to be disproportionately white compared to their non-union counterparts and the labor movement in general. Although women have historically been kept out of the construction industry altogether, blacks, Latinos, Asians, American Indians, and other racial minorities are very prevalent in the industry, yet are often relegated to the least skilled, worst paying, non-union positions. Within the ranks of the union, minorities are rarely promoted to influential positions in their locals. [2] In New York City a large proportion of union Carpenters are first and second generation Irish immigrants, giving progressives a segway into arguing in favor of immigration reform. Yet despite the fact that official UBC policy is now pro-immigrant, many white construction workers, even in New York City, are wearing stickers on their hardhats that read, “America is Full”.[3]

This particular brand of racism plays into another conservative characteristic of many union carpenters: nationalism. Many carpenters are fervent nationalists. They wave their Chinese-sweatshop-made American flags so proudly that interns are required to write stories about it (Carpenter, p. 15). During the war on Iraq the union Carpenters (along with other building trades) organized a pro-war “Support Our Troops” rally, and the General Executive Board of the NYC District Council wrote bold statements about “liberating Iraqis” (i.e. liberating Iraqi oil) in the opening pages of the Carpenter.

Along with nationalism comes an embrace of the very economic system that keeps them in wage slavery. Few Carpenters have seriously challenged the lovey-dovey “Labor Management” strategy that the union pursues in its relationship with union contractors. Many members aspire to become contractors themselves (and a fair number actually do). Decades ago carpenters were part of the working poor, but after building a union that dramatically increased their wages and benefits, many have forgotten their roots and think of themselves as middle class beneficiaries of a capitalist society. The union leadership actively encourages this mindset. An example: While attempting to search the District Council website I kept receiving confusing errors from my browser. I didn’t understand what the problem was until I realized that the search engine on the website was only designed to bring up stock quotes.[4]

Much of the social politics of UBC members is carried into the electoral politics of the official union bodies. The Carpenters are one of the very few unions in America that can truthfully say that they don’t have their lips firmly attached to the ass of the Democratic Party, that hypocritical junta that sucks up the earnings of millions of hard working union members every year, only to spend their time in office passing corporate welfare bills and weakening labor laws. But don’t celebrate yet! You see, the reason the Carpenters are lukewarm to the Democrats is because they want to be friends with the Republicans! Unlike the Democrats, the Republican Party is not hypocritical at all. Republicans say they are going to make policy that will benefit corporations above all else, and they keep their promise. Unions make them revile, with only a few exceptions. One of those exceptions is the Carpenters.

The Carpenters’ warmth toward the Republican Party goes far beyond the standard policy of unions to make short-term deals with local Republicans like New York Governor George Pataki. UBC General President Douglas McCarron has led the union into a game of footsie with George W. Bush, one of the most anti-worker Presidents in American history.[5] According to an article from The New Republic Online, “Bush has joined McCarron at the Carpenters' Labor Day picnics in 2001 and 2002, he has entertained McCarron twice on Air Force One, and he has made McCarron the only labor leader invited to address his Economic Summit in Houston last summer. Last month, hosting McCarron in the White House for the signing of the terrorism insurance bill, Bush singled out the UBC's president. "Appreciate your leadership, Doug," Bush said.” (Judis)

There is even a chance (although unlikely) that the Carpenters will endorse Bush for President in 2004. The Bush Administration’s record clearly demonstrates that he is bad for union carpenters. During their three years in office, the Bush gang have already weakened workplace injury statutes, refused to extend the normal Davis Bacon prevailing wage guarantees to Homeland Security Department construction projects, and are launching an attack on overtime laws. (Judis) So why do McCarron and his cohorts court an anti-worker president who is even further to the right than most of the UBC’s admittedly conservative members? Judis suggests that McCarron’s biggest motive is to ensure that the government sides with him against a rank and file rebellion that is taking place across the country by dissident locals and members of the reform caucus Carpenters for a Democratic Union.

The reformers are launching legal challenges to McCarron’s undemocratic and apparently illegal practice of denying members the right to directly elect officers of their regional council, the large, intermediate bodies that now perform most of the functions usually reserved to a local. The locals have been reduced to little more than convenient geographic and specialized trade divisions within the regional council. The regional councils—not the locals--have the power to “organiz[e], negotiate and enforce collective bargaining agreements, control job referrals, retain most dues, and discipline members”, in the words of Judge Richard G. Stearns of the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts. (Biers) Yet the officials of the regional council are elected by delegates, who are in turn elected by the members—and even the delegates are basically powerless because their nominees must be approved by the all-powerful Executive Secretary Treasurer (EST) of the Regional Council. In effect, members have very little if any control over who their officials should be. Officials are often hand-picked by the EST, providing a corrupt incentive for delegates to re-elect an EST in hopes of being rewarded with a juicy regional council position.

For several years, pro-democracy carpenters in New England led by Thomas Harrington, former business manager of Boston Local 33, filed suit against the New England Regional Council to overturn their power structure on the basis of the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act, which mandates that officials of local unions must be directly elected by its members once every three years. Harrington’s case was shot down repeatedly by conservative judges and a Bush-controlled Department of Labor. Then on October 8, 2003, Judge Stearns ruled in Harrington’s favor, declaring the rulings of the previous judges to be erroneous, “arbitrary, and capricious” (Biers) and ordered the New England Regional Council to institute direct elections of their officers. While this suit was in court, Harrington beat the odds in an uphill bid for Executive Secretary Treasurer and was carried to victory by a rebellious majority of the 27,000 members of the New England Regional Council of Carpenters. If the new ruling, Harrington v. Chao, is not overturned, it will no doubt have a far-reaching and profound impact on the structure of UBC and could also set precedents that benefit pro-democracy caucuses in other unions.

Yet in New York City and indeed most of the country, union democracy of the kind supported by the New England carpenters does not seem to be in very high demand. In the few conversations I was able to have with rank and file, non-office-holding carpenters, most of them had little to say about the union except “God Bless [Executive Secretary Treasurer] Mike Forde and the District Council. I support my leaders all the way”. Why such seemingly slavish devotion to the leadership? Mike Forde is a jovial, charismatic individual, but he’s not exactly a god-like figure. Or is he?

According to a UBC member I have been in touch with, “These workers come from a job site where the foreman is king and the shop steward is the union. They tend to look at the union as their God, rather than their son. People rarely question God. From nine to five, or whatever, they are told what to do and they do it because they think that if the Union says so, then it’s right and they are not under the boss’ thumb, only under the union’s thumb. So in this way, I don’t think it’s that the union does not empower the members; it’s that the members do not empower themselves.”

This explanation goes a long way toward gaining an insight into the mind of the average union carpenter. It is part of the cultural experience (one could call it conditioning) of many members. Clearly a small group of leaders have imposed a structure on the members that a significant number are frustrated with. Organizations like Carpenters for a Democratic Union (CDU) would not exist if this were not the case. Yet there is also a large base of rank and file carpenters who genuinely support the paternalistic model and its conservative practices. If union reformers ignore this reality they are in effect ignoring the members, and doing that will get them nowhere. A hard lesson that I learned from my internship is that many of the features that radicals indignantly denounce in the name of the rank and file are actually seen as positive things by many union members. I’m thinking of the member who is able to send her kids to college because of the wages her union leaders negotiated in a backroom deal while she was too busy taking care of her family to go to local meetings, the member that feels secure knowing that the class peace ensured by labor management means he won't have to go on strike or risk his job while his wife is giving birth, the rank and file member that believes in the union but would rather support it by picketing a non-union contractor than by meeting with that contractor's employees and persuading them to fight their boss.

We must strive to understand our fellow workers on their own terms, so that they can do the same for us. We must do what legendary organizer Saul Alinsky called "getting within their experience"(Alinsky, [phrase appears frequently in book]) so that we can begin the process of real communication that is the first step to creating a base for the radical transformation of the building trades and society at large. Student radicals and even many of the more radical members of UBC come from very different backgrounds and social conditionings than the archetypal "God Bless Mike Forde" red, white, and blue blooded American carpenter. Yet the opportunity for communication that was so painfully absent in the Vietnam era is now present, if precarious. The New England uprising is evidence that the potential for change is there, if we can simply break through the communication barrier. Students and student organizations like United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS)—as well as other labor radicals and revolutionary unions like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)--can be a part of that breakthrough by showing solidarity with rank and file carpenters who have grievances (either against the boss or against the union leadership) that the union bureaucracy has refused to redress.

Meanwhile, there are steps that ex-students can take to reorient the direction of the union from within the bureaucracy. New staffers, especially ex-student radicals, are rarely given much power over structural issues in the union, especially in outsider-wary unions like the Carpenters. This is OK, because democracy cannot be granted by an enlightened faction of an entrenched power structure. It must come from the rank and file or it is not democracy.

The role of progressive radical staffers in a union like the Carpenters should be to encourage the union to be more aggressive, progressive, inclusive, and movement-oriented in their activities. NYCDCC Organizing Projects Manager and former UnionSemester student Andres Puerta has expressed the idea that the Carpenters should show more solidarity, collaboration, and joint-campaigning with service industry unions in the buildings that UBC members work on. Such a relationship would go a long way toward making the Carpenters a more integral component in labor justice struggles of broad social significance. The thought of carpenters honoring service employee picket lines and vice versa on a nationwide scale is enticing but hard to imagine. Yet the rhetoric of McCarron et al’s “New Unity Partnership” (NUP) would lead logically to this conclusion. If a few smart young militants formulate some concrete ideas for how this could work in UBC’s favor, the power players might just implement them. Douglas McCarron and his underlings are authoritarian, but they’re also shrewd. They wouldn’t pass up an idea that could bolster their prestige. A handful of low-level creative, intelligent, ex-student organizers across the country—especially if they keep in touch with each other and with progressive/radical “outsiders”—can have a level of influence that far exceeds their on-paper status as bottom-rung staffers. As an intern I had absolutely zero power on paper. Yet in a few short months I was able to send an uncompromisingly pro-immigrant message to over twenty thousand members, help influence the District Council to make an anti-Bush stand, and make the office aware of the Coca-Cola boycott being called by the Colombian union SINALTRAINAL. Think of how much more a full-timer staffer could do.

Of course there are limits. The article I wrote for the International UBC magazine about the Yale strike[6] got axed in favor of a photo-essay of anti-union Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert getting a hands-on tour of new UBC training facilities in Las Vegas. (Carpenter p. 44) Andres told me that he once suggested that the union should march in the Gay Pride Parade. His supervisor asked him if he was crazy. And it would take a miracle (or a massive rank and file movement) to put an end to the destructive inter-craft jurisdictional in-fighting that is diverting resources from organizing and is killing inter-union solidarity.

Still, the potential for change is enormous, and it is already beginning. New York union officials are eager to put the UBC’s history of mob-ties and corruption behind them (at least to a certain extent). Women staffers and members are aggressively developing channels of power for their “sisters in the brotherhood”. Reform-oriented (and revolutionary) members are toppling entrenched structures and oppressive regimes in their Regional Councils. Last year, a nation-wide conference of radical construction workers brought together visionary union and non-union construction workers for the first time in a long while.

Despite the relatively high wages of carpenters, they are still the lowest paid skilled construction trade (i.e. they have more to gain from militancy than the other skilled trades do) and the UBC is also the skilled construction trade most committed to organizing. The “unskilled” Laborers are also an organizing union, make even less money, and have many more immigrants and people of color than the other building trades. However, they have certain disadvantages compared to the Carpenters: e.g. most of their members aren’t actually construction workers (half of the membership is postal workers). (Gangbox) In light of the New Unity Partnership (NUP), these two unions are in an excellent position to lead the building trades into a more militant, progressive, and prosperous era. NUP as it now stands can be a force for either good or evil. NUP could wind up dividing the labor movement, raiding and crushing independent unions, disempowering members, kissing up to the Bush Administration, making sweetheart deals for card check agreements, and diverting resources from important and necessary programs, or it could become a catalyst for a militant, solidarity-based, mass-movement-oriented organizing drive that could revitalize the labor movement and challenge the global corporate hegemony. Right now the NUPsters are at a crossroads, and relatively small waves of influence could blow them in either direction. The road that NUP and the labor movement choose may ultimately rest with the initiative of students, ex-student staffers, and rank and file radicals, especially those within the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America. This is why it is urgent that we take action to reform this union now.

The Carpenters union was born in 1881 as a radical, militant, mass movement-oriented organization. As the economy begins to resemble that of 1881 once again, there is no reason that what once was cannot be again. Considering recent developments that have taken place in the UBC and the labor movement at large, now is a perfect moment for such a change to take place. Students, ex-student staffers, and other non-carpenters can be a part of this resurgence, but only if they respect the concerns, desires, and intelligence of rank and filers. If I learned anything this semester, it’s the importance of hope. If we sincerely believe that a different kind of labor movement is possible, there is nothing that we can’t accomplish.